Golf Suddenly Seems Green Again

Rory McIlroy

Sports Saturday

I’ve been trying to figure out my emotions about 22-year-old Irishman Rory McIlroy winning the U.S. Open golf tournament last weekend.  A passionate Lucille Clifton poem is helping me do it.  The poem has nothing to do with sports, let alone with golf, but it provides an example of how literature can work indirectly to help us make sense of things.

To add an element of mystery to this post, I’ll cite the poem first before I explain.  See if you can figure out the connection.  “there is a girl inside” is a defiant assertion by an old woman that, although she is aging, she is still sexually alive.  She is “a green girl in a used poet”:

there is a girl inside.
she is randy as a wolf.
she will not walk away
and leave these bones
to an old woman.

she is a green tree
in a forest of kindling.
she is a green girl
in a used poet.

she has waited
patient as a nun
for the second coming,
when she can break through gray hairs
into blossom

and her lovers will harvest
honey and thyme
and the woods will be wild
with the damn wonder of it.

Clifton has written a number of poems affirming that women who are not young or (by society’s prevailing standards) beautiful can nevertheless be sexually magnetic.  (Check out, for instance, “homage to my hips”  and “what the mirror said.”)  But what has any of this to do with golf?

Well, golf has not felt green recently, at least to casual viewers like myself.  “Forest of kindling” sounds closer to the mark.  That’s partly because one indistinguishable winner after another has been walking away with championships.  Worse yet, Tiger, tainted by scandal, has been ailing.  Love him or hate him, one feels one has to watch to see if he can break Jack Nicklaus’s record.  But Tiger’s driving style places intolerable strains on his body so that he has begun breaking down.  When I heard that Tiger wouldn’t be playing in the U.S. Open, a tournament he once won while playing with a torn knee ligament and a double stress fracture, I decided I wouldn’t watch. I was prepared to walk away and leave golf to its old bones.

But something happened in the course of the tournament.  Clifton’s poem is about the “damn wonder” of renewal, and golf is catching a whiff of something fresh in the boy-faced McIlroy.  The sport has been waiting for years (although maybe not as patiently as a nun) for someone who could challenge Tiger.  Perhaps golf’s next Tiger has arrived.  And if Tiger isn’t entirely over-the-hill, maybe we will finally have the rivalry that Tiger could never get from Phil Mickelson or Colin Montgomery or David Duval or V. J. Singh or Sergio Garcia.  Maybe Rory McIlroy is finally the real deal.

Golf is sensing that it can break through gray hairs into blossom.  Maybe it’s time for the woods to go wild and be filled with the damn wonder of a scintillating new champion.  Dare to hope.

Added Note –

In The Universal Baseball Association, J. Waugh Proprietor, Robert Coover captures how a sport can sink into a lethargy and then how it can be awakened by an exciting new talent.  In a post last year I applied Coover’s observation to rookie pitcher Steve Strasburg of the Nationals.  Maybe it fits golf and McIlroy as well:

Henry hadn’t been so excited in weeks. Months. That was the way it was, some days seemed to pass almost without being seen, games lived through, decisions made, averages rising or dipping, and all of it happening in a kind of fog, until one day that astonishing event would occur that brought sudden life and immediacy to the Association, and everybody would suddenly wake up and wonder at the time that had got by them, go back to the box scores, try to find out what had happened. During those dull-minded stretches, even a home run was nothing more than an HR penned into the box score; sure, there was a fence and a ball sailing over it, but Henry didn’t see them—oh, he heard the shouting of the faithful, yes, they stayed with it, they had to, but to him it was just a distant echo, static that let you know it was still going on. But then, contrarily, when someone like Damon Rutherford came along to flip the switch, turn things on, why, even a pop-up to the pitcher took on excitement, a certain dimension, color.

Color may be coming back into the game.

But be warned. Strasburg also provides a cautionary tale (as does Damon Rutherford in Coover’s novel): at the moment the Nationals pitcher is rehabbing from major surgery to his throwing arm.  Hopes that are raised can also be dashed.  Or at least suspended.

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